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Provides: Font library management and repair
Developer: Insider Software
Minimum Requirements: Mac OS X v10.3.9, G4 or Intel processor
Retail Price: Single User: $99.99, Workgroup Edition: $129.95.
If you have a Mac, you have fonts, and chances are the longer you've had your Mac, the more fonts you've collected over the years. If you simply installed all of the fonts you've collected over time, you probably have noticed that programs that should open right up are now taking longer and longer (as the program's startup screen is saying things like "building font menu"). You also will have noticed that your font menus are longer and longer, and lastly, you might have seen that programs are crashing at odd times and your friends are suggesting that you check your fonts. What should you do? Get a font management program like Font Agent Pro: that would be a good start.
When the Mac first came out, it had fonts, icons, and other things that just were not known to the average person—even to most computer users at the time. At first, there was no easy way to get fonts in or out or your system, but when the Font/DA Mover was released, you didn't have to go through complex fancy tricks to get access to new fonts. Then, about the time that third-party font management programs were released, you could get new fonts from friends on floppy discs. As soon as CDs came out, you could get CDs full of fonts. Some were good; others, not so much. In addition, some software companies began shipping fonts with their programs, and a number of these are excellent. The full effect of all this is that either by purchasing the fonts or getting them for free (or bundled), we have access to thousands of fonts.
The catch is, while having a lot of fonts can be fun and/or provide a tremendous amount of potential graphic benefits, the more fonts you have open at any given time, the more chance the performance of your computer will be severely degraded. However, regardless of the quality of all of your fonts, it's hard to part with any of them. If you are like me, you could easily have upwards of over 3,000 fonts on your computer. This is where font management comes in. A font manager lets you control which fonts are actively running on your computer at any time and lets you stop and start fonts at any time. In other words, a good font manager lets you have your cake and eat it too. Speaking of which, FontAgent Pro (FAP) is an excellent font manager.
Getting your fonts into FA Pro is about as easy as it can get: you can take every font you have in every folder that has a font and drag it onto FAP and the process is initiated. You can also select Import Fonts from the File menu or click on the Import icon on the FAP window, or best yet: grab any folder you have of any collection of fonts and simply drag the folder onto FAP and let go. Once you do that, a Sheet drops from the title bar with your import options (as seen below). The default location for all fonts is a new folder called "My Fonts" that will be placed in your /Users/(self)/Documents folder.
Once completed, a new folder has been created in your User -> (name) folder called FontAgent Pro Fonts. Inside that will be My Fonts, and inside that folder will all of the installed fonts separated alphabetically. In addition will be the full collection of the problem fonts. Over the years, I've managed to collect a series of fonts I knew were in doubt, but had not taken the time to deal with. FontAgent Pro dealt with them all for me in one fell swoop—done.
Now that you have your fonts in FontAgent Pro, FAP's screen is laid out in a basic, logical approach for easy access. Across the top are your various icon/buttons to control your fonts and program operations. On the left side is a view of all of the fonts for any given set you've selected. It might be all of your fonts, only active fonts, only inactive fonts, or specific types of fonts like Mac dfonts, true type fonts, postscript, open type, etc. On the upper right are your font sets (more on that later), and below that is a widow to see the characters of that font.
A font can be activated by simply clicking on the region of the blue dot (or gray when the font is not active) as seen in the font list window (far left). If the dot is gray, the font is inactive, and if you click on a gray dot, it becomes blue (and it's active). An active font is available to the programs on your system. One of the nifty thing about the Mac OS X is that most applications will quickly recognize the font (as opposed to OS 9 and earlier where you had to stop and start any given program before the program could recognize the newly activated font).
If you are working on a specific project that uses a bunch of fonts you would not normally have open, you can create custom "Sets" with these fonts that can be activated all at once. These sets can be seen in the upper right part of the window above. This way, when you are about to start working on a project, you turn on the required fonts to activate them all at once, and once done, you can turn off the fonts so you don't bog your system down any more than you want or need.
One of the side benefits of a font manager is that it lets you see all of the "amazing fonts" you collected over the years and lets you see the Klingon font that seemed so important years ago and lets you re-think about how important that font is nowadays. If you delete a font from the left-hand list, it's gone from FAP (if you haven't deleted the font from the rest of your system, you still have it available, but if the copy in FAP was your only copy, it's gone). If you delete a font from within any set, it's only removed from that set and is still available within FAP.
Back to the Font Listing window (far left), you have two options to display your font: by Family and/or by WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). Fonts viewed with WYSIWYG turned off is pretty straightforward. When viewed with a generic font (as seen below on the right), each font is not as recognizable as it could be else wise. The big catch here is that full WYSIWYG requires a lot of processing from your computer and your activities in FAP will slow down depending on the number of fonts you have installed. Most of my tests were done a G5 2.5 GHz dual processor. Not the latest machine out there, but no slouch. When working on my Intel Mac things were much better, but none the less, there was a lot of processing being pushed for the OS to process all of the data required.
When you have By Family set to off, each fonts type is displayed. [This is a good time to explain to anyone who doesn't know this piece of font trivia: a standard font, the bold version, the italic version and the bold italic version of the same font are actually four separate fonts. Together, they are one font family. It's possible (and not uncommon) for a font family from different foundries to cover different aspects of the same font name.] Below, you can see a whole collection of Garamond-named fonts.
However, once I turned By Family on, this dropped in size down to a total of six Garamond families.
Each of these are a family. Unfortunately there is no way to mix and match the individual pieces into "families" of your choice. This is a limitation of fonts, not FAP. You can see the various fonts within each family by clicking on the arrowhead next to each font family. This leads to one unfortunate design display problem for the By Family view, and that is immediately apparent when you go to display the parts of a font family, as seen below:
Notice there is no indent of each font of a font family at the bullet level. By indenting the individual bullets, it would be much easier to see the fonts contained within individual families. As it is, there is no way to visually break each family as a separate unit when also looking at the contained fonts. By the way, if you click on the blue dot for a family, each font within that family is activated, but if you only click on individual fonts, only that font will be activated. Thus, when looking at the image above, if you only clicked on the Bold and Bold-Italic, only those two fonts from that family would be activated.
Another missing feature when looking at opened families is that there is no way to open or close all of the doors at one time. Consider, I've opened up a set or a small group of fonts, and I want to see the individual fonts within the font family but wish to keep the fonts in their families. I have to click on each font family one-by-one to see the individual fonts and, likewise, close them one-by-one. It would be nice if there was a contextual menu or a button that said something to the effect "Open/Close all font families."
On the right side is the Preview region. This has two tabs: Font Compare and Font Player. Font Compare lets you see one line of text and how that line of text appears with the selected fonts. You can set whatever text you want, what you see below is the default text (a little bit of marketing here, no?). Anyhow, let's say you wanted a nice, large, bold, san-serif font. As you scroll down the list view, you can Control-click on the fonts you want to compare. As you can see, you can set the font's size by clicking up or down (or manually typing in a size) just to the right of where you enter the text you want to display. If you have the Font Compare tab selected when you click on a family, you see all of the different weights and variations available within that family.
If you click on the "Player" tab, the view is quite different. Here, you can see a variety of options. This is my personal favorite, the one that shows you all of the basic characters in any given font, and some customizable text. One of the things I particularly like about this view is that if you picked up free fonts from here or there (and who hasn't), it's not uncommon for free fonts to be missing a few characters. In this case, you can see that this font is missing the "@," "#," and "^" characters. If you figure the work you are doing is not likely to ever use those characters, than no big deal. But it sure is better to find out about that before you start a project. [Be advised that some free fonts are missing more important things like "W" and/or "B." This is done so you see the font, try the font, and if you buy the font you can have all of the font. It's not too different than shareware letting you do everything but save your document (or the like).]
In all of the views, you can click on any given font and then press the up or down arrow on your keyboard to scroll though all of the available fonts. But hey, this is a computer, let the computer do some work, right? So, with the option of Font Player, yes, you can have your fonts "play" for you like a slideshow. If you've selected a collection of fonts in the left hand panel, you can click the "play" (>>) or (<<) button, sit back and peruse your fonts. You can control the speed of the show by dragging the slider to the right (faster) or left (slower). Unfortunately there is no way to set the speed to a given time (e.g., "2 seconds"). If you click on the individual forward and back buttons "<" or ">," it's no different from tapping the up or down arrows. If you click on the first button—the circle—a new set is created (default named "Font Player Set" and can be renamed). Each time you click the circle button, the font is added to this new set.
The full scenario might work like this: you have a new project and you want a font of a certain type. You go through all of your fonts and select specific ones in which you might be interested. Now's the time to give that set a formal name, something original like "My Project." Now, you may have noticed that the left hand list region had two tabs: one called All Fonts, and the other called Sets. If you select Sets, you get the same listing that you do in the upper right region of the FAP window. If you click on "My Project" in the left hand side viewing of Sets, you can then run Font Player again. Start hitting the circle button again, and a new set is created with the original title of "Font Player Set." Thus, you can continue to go through your fonts until you selected just the one(s) you want.
Besides the ABC123 view, the Font Player tab provides three other options: Waterfall, Paragraph, and Custom. Waterfall is a particularly important way of viewing of a font because some fonts (particularly script fonts) just do not work as you get smaller and smaller. The default sizes are 10, 14, 18, 24, and 36. You can set your own sizes in the Preferences to any size from 4 -> 128, but only five different sizes can be set. By the way, the little icon just to the right of the drop down menu is a quick access button to the Preferences for setting features just like this. To the right of that icon is the Printer icon if you want to see what you've selected looks like in print.
The Paragraph option displays a full paragraph of "lorem ipsum" text, while the Custom lets you manually enter or paste in text of your choosing.
So, once you selected, activated, and deactivated your fonts, now what? Well, for the most part, you are done. The good news is that FontAgent Pro is always working even when it's off. Thus, as you subsequently start documents that have fonts that you do not have currently running, FAP will automatically be opening fonts on the fly. If you keep your active fonts to a fairly limited number, you will be seeing a lot of this. What is curious is the number of fonts that some documents seem to need that do not ring any bells. Not sure what was so necessary about the font below, but some program I had started sure needed it.
Unfortunately, not all programs are as good about the auto-activation as they could be; particularly Adobe and Quark products. Each of them has its own proprietary font enabling mechanism. Thus, FAP provides special plugins to be placed in Quark as well as Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. Once installed, these plugins provide the same level of auto-activation as other programs.
Working with your fonts on other computers has some legal issues, but if you are on a network and have the FontAgent Pro Workgroup Edition, you can share fonts from your computer with others. Meanwhile, it is easy to locate and export fonts if you need to send them to a service borough for printing purposes.
There are certain limitations with FAP that I'd like to see overcome. For example, there is no recognition of Open Type fonts beyond FAP's ability to recognize and label them as such. All you can see are the standard 230 ASCII characters—nowhere near the 1.1 million possible Unicode characters. More of a limitation is that FAP has some difficulties "seeing" some fonts properly. For example, both Apple's Zaph Dingbats and MS's WebDing fonts are only shown as generic standard typefaces instead of the dingbat fonts they are. The peculiar thing about this is that other dingbat fonts show up just fine in WYSIWYG. In other cases, the name of some fonts just show up as a blank space. If you want to see the name, you need to turn off WYSIWYG.
Another missing feature is the ability to "preview" fonts that are not installed in your system or imported into FAP. There are times when I get a font and I want to give it a quick look before I install it. Now, I have to install the font and find it in FAP. If I do not want/need the font, I have to delete the font. In the grand scheme of things, that's not a big deal, but if I can avoid extra steps in my life, that's a bonus.
Overall, Font Agent Pro has proven to be a robust font management program. But always the question comes up, "Why should I spend my good money on a program when Apple has provided me Font Book for free?" I guess the easy answer is if you do not have too many fonts, your font menus do not drag for ever and ever, you never need to turn your fonts on and off quickly and easily, and you are certain you do not have any corrupted fonts and are not likely to ever have a corrupted font, then you might not need a formal font management program. Otherwise, you'd be in error to not consider Font Agent Pro.
___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.
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